3/16/18

On
December 20, 1893, The Half-Penny Marvel published "The
Missing Millionaire" by "Hal Meredeth," a penname of Harry
Blythe, which marked the first appearance of the most prolific
Sherlock Holmes imitators in all of popular fiction, Sexton
Blake, whose bibliography comprises of an astonishing 4,000
stories – written by over 200 different writers. A prolific run of
eight decades that ended up encompassing short stories, novels, stage
plays, comic books, silent movies, talkies, radio serials and even a
TV-series in the 1960s.

So
the sheer size and volume of the Sexton Blake Library has earned the
series its own separate wing in the crime-genre, but, as everyone
knows, quantity is rarely a substitute for quality. And this series
is no exception.

Sexton
Blake is synonymous with tawdry, formulaic thrillers with
run-of-the-mill action scenes, pulpy gangsters and super-human
villains (i.e. Waldo the Wonderman). That may be why I was never
compelled to explore this series. A chronic lack of interest that
persisted even when I learned that one of the greatest authorities on
the impossible crime story, Derek
Smith, had tried his hands at one that faced Blake with "a
sealed room murder," which is usually more than enough to get
my full attention – except that this time even that didn't work. A
Sexton Blake novel simply did not appeal to me. No matter who wrote
it.

That
is, until that infernal nuisance, "JJ," posted a review
on his blog claiming Smith's wrote "a legitimate excellent"
Blake story filled "lovely clues." Showing what could have
been had the writers not turned Blake in bargain basement cross
between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond.

So
I decided to get myself a copy of Model for Murder (1952),
which went unpublished during Smith's lifetime, but was finally
printed in The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014) along with Whistle
Up the Devil (1954), Come
to Paddington Fair (1997) and a short story – titled "The
Imperfect Crime." Admittedly, the story was better than I expected
even after the positive review from JJ. Most notably the opening
chapters and a conclusion that resembles a contortion act!

John
Pugmire's Locked Room
International published The Derek Smith Omnibus and
speculated Model for Murder was probably "too cerebral
for the audience," which would explain why it collected dust
for sixty years. Anyway...

Model
for Murder, or Model Murder, begins when an artist's
model, Linda Martin, hurries to Baker Street on behalf of her
employer, Leo Garvary, a once well-known sculptor who has been
receiving anonymous letters of a threatening nature. That morning,
Garvary received another threatening letter, but this he confided in
Martin that he finally guessed who sent him and asked her to fetch
Blake – who happens to be abroad on a case of national importance.
So the task falls on the shoulders of his assistant, Tinker, whose
role in this story genuinely surprised me.

Tinker
is definitely not your regular Dr. Watson or Capt. Hastings, more of
an Archie Goodwin-type of character, who actually solves the locked
room problem before Blake officially enters the picture. But I'm
getting ahead of myself.

When
Tinker and Martin arrive at the studio, they see the eccentric
Garvary standing by the door of his soundproof studio. He looks at
them, enters the studio, slams and locks the door behind him and
that's the last time they see him alive, because when a spare key
from the desk clerk opens the door they find an empty studio. All of
the windows are "securely latched" from the inside. A
transom was secured by a triple notched bar and a second door was
locked and bolted on the studio side. After a brief search, they find
Garvary's body in one of the cupboards lining the left and right hand
wall, but not an atom of proof someone had been present in the room
to fire the gun.

Firstly,
the locked room trick is not as ingenious as the one from Whistle Up
the Devil and basically reuses an age-old technique to leave behind a
locked crime-scene. So you should not go into the book expecting a
knock-out classic like his second impossible crime novel, but
admittedly, Smith used this technique with the expertise of locked
room expert. Smith mentioned two potential explanations,
trick-windows that slide into the wall and a hollow statue, which
gave me an idea for an alternative explanation.

When
the possibility of a hollow statue was mentioned, my mind immediately
conjured up the image of a Russian nesting doll. You see, there were
three cupboards on each side of the room.

Just
imagine the studio used to have two, large storage closets, but these
closets were converted into six, separate cupboards and this would
open the possibility that the walls separating the middle cupboard
from the first and third cupboard is very thin, no more than wooden
panels, which perhaps consists of two halves that can slide into one
another – to make more room when needed. So the murderer could have
been hidden in the second cupboard and, when this person heard Tinker
close the door of the first cupboard, crawled into it through the
sliding wall panel. Like a human shell game. And simply slip out of
the room when everyone's attention was somewhere else (like
inspecting the inner room).

However,
the solution to the locked room murder turned out to be very
different. Surprisingly, Tinker not only worked out the locked room
trick, but demonstrated the trick to a baffled police constable, who
demanded answers, which he refused to do until he had spoken to his
employer – only to get shot and seriously wounded a short time
later. A shooting briefly presented as a (semi) impossibility, but
this aspect is quickly dispelled by a discovery in the hearth.

In
any case, this murderous attempt effectively removed Tinker from the
stage and left Blake with the daunting task to work out an
explanation based on the breadcrumbs of information his assistant
left behind. However, the pure detective elements from the opening
chapters began to dilute in the middle section.

The
reader knows by this point who shot Tinker and that this person has a
connection with a shadowy underworld figure, but, more importantly,
the gunman is determined to get his hands on a little black book
filled with information of his criminal enterprise. So the seedy
thriller elements really kick in here and this person even kidnaps
and physically abuses Martin. This portion of the plot is the part
that adheres to the formula of the series.

Luckily,
Smith came back strong in the final stages of the story by serving a
triple-layered solution to the reader. A solution that volleyed the
guilt of the murder between two characters. This is likely the part
that was too cerebral for its intended audience, because the
conclusion is everything you'd expect from a legitimate expert on the
traditional detective story. Model for Murder should have been
a model for this series during its twilight years. It would be funny
if this series had gone against the trend

In
summation, Model for Murder is an interesting experiment of a
traditional-minded mystery writer attempting to worm a puzzle-plot
into the formula of a cheap, action-oriented series of pulp-thrillers
and defied expectations by succeeding – better than he had any
right to. I probably will never read another Sexton Blake story in my
life, but glad I took a change on this one. I really like Smith and
this world is a poorer place for the fact that he only wrote three
(locked room) novels.

Finally,
I referred to JJ's review earlier and in it he mentioned a confusing
fact regarding the locked door of the studio. JJ said that the door
was described as not having a keyhole, but was unlocked with a key a
few pages later. I think JJ misunderstood this. The door didn't have
an old-fashioned keyhole that you can look through, which were still
common (indoors) in the fifties, but there was a modern lock on the
door. A yale lock. So Smith didn't make a sloppy mistake there.

3/13/18

Last
year, I finally got around to reading a detective novel by J.J.
Connington, namely Murder
in the Maze (1927), who was one of the mystery novelist that
was smeared as a humdrum writer and dismissed as a relic of the
genre's past – a label that was also pasted on Freeman
Wills Crofts and John
Rhode. However, the test of time is slowly exculpating their
reputation and legacy as they're finding their way back into print.
Readers can now judge their stories without emptying their bank
account to acquire an overpriced, second-hand copy.

Connington
is one of the luckier humdrum writers whose work has been mostly
reissued by now as either paperback editions or ebooks, which is why
I recently decided to stock-up on his Sir Clinton Driffield series.
And a couple of non-series titles. Connington still represents one of
the biggest holes in my reading of the classic detective story. I
think I have read more detective stories by obscure, long-forgotten
writers than of the household names of the era and that's just being
impious.

So
I plucked Jack-in-the-Box (1944) from this freshly accumulated
pile and have to say, as far as mysteries with a World War II
background goes, this proved to be memorable example with depictions
of the bombing raids by the Luftwaffe – which is used here
to camouflage a murder victim as a casualty of war. An idea that only
Rhode seems to have played around with in The
Fourth Bomb (1942).

Jack-in-the-Box
was published in 1944, but the story takes place in 1942 and begins
when Sir Clinton Driffield and Squire Wendover are driving through
the village of Ambledown and observe the wreckage left behind by the
last swarm of Nazi bombers.

Ambledown
took "a bit of a knock" in an attempt to destroy a nearby
magneto factory, which left forty-three dead and quite some property
damage, but the bombers missed their target. So everyone expects them
to return and they come back early on in the novel. Connington also
touches upon the effect the war has on the day to day lives of
ordinary people, rationing, housing shortages and blackouts, which
forced the people "to be content with the essentials" and "do without the frills" – one of the reasons why so many
traditional mysteries from this period tend to be bleaker than those
from previous decades. However, the initial reason Sir Clinton and
Wendover drove to Ambledown is not related to the war.

A
local archaeologist has unearthed a long-lost treasure trove at a
digging site locally referred to as Caesar's Camp.

The
place is an old Roman camp, on a tract of wasteland to the west of
the village, but the spot probably has as much a connection with
Caesar as "the Menai Bridge or Buckingham Palace." There
was, however, a legend attached to the Roman camp about a cursed
treasure promising death to the unlucky finder. Robert Deverell,
President of the Natural History Society of Ambledown, brought "a
collection of vessels and utensils" to light when digging for
Roman-era coins. All of the objects were of gold and beaten and
twisted out of shape, which made the collection easier to transport
for the ancient looters who had buried their plunder there so many
moons ago. A plunder that obviously came from an abbey.

This
treasure belongs to the crown, but Deverell is granted permission to
inspect and catalog the treasure, piece by piece, at his own home.
But than the Luftwaffe pays a second visit to Ambledown and
Deverell is killed by enemy action. Or so it looks like.

Apparently,
an incendiary bomb had crashed through the skylight, hitting Deverell
on the head, and setting fire to the house. An unlikely way to die,
one in a million, but suspicion is aroused when pieces of the
treasure turn out to have been taken from the scene – which
included a battered crosier. Complications begin to pileup when the
village is hit by an outbreak of inexplicable deaths. There are no
less than five murders that have to be disentangled by Inspector
Camlet, Squire Wendover and Sir Clinton (who's the Chief Constable).
And, as if that wasn't enough, there's a super-normal plot-thread
that places Jack-in-the-Box on the borders of the impossible
crime sub-genre.

Jehudi
Ashmun is a mulatto from Liberia and stands at the center of a group,
in the village, who are interested in the occult and a technique,
which had been lost in the mists of time, called New Force. Ashmun
made an ordinary card-table talk and a loudspeaker was disregarded as
a possible answer, because you can't hide a loudspeaker in "one
of these slim-jim folding affairs" with "a top hardly
thicker than plywood" – especially in the 1940s. The ancient
powers of New Force is demonstrated by fiddling on a violin and this
killed several animals.

Ashum
killed an aquarium of minnows, but electricity was eliminated as the
invisible killer. After this demonstration, a warren of dead rabbits
were found outside. None of the rabbits had a mark on their body or
even as much as a minute trace of poison in their system.

On
a side note, Nick Fuller, of The
Grandest Game in the World, pointed out in his review
that similar figures appear in Carter Dickson's The
Reader is Warned (1939) and Anthony Boucher's Nine
Times Nine (1940). Interestingly, the character in The
Reader is Warned claims to possess a power, called Teleforce,
which can be used to kill people from a distance without leaving a
mark on their body. Something very similar to Ashum's New Force.

So
with stolen treasures, a murder epidemic and super-normal forces
abound you need a logical, cool-headed detective to tackle these
problems and Sir Clinton is more than up for the task. Sir Clinton
pleasantly reviews all of the events and weighs the evidence against
all of the possibilities, but doesn't neglect his duties to play the
role of Great Detective and teases his friend with his knowledge of
the truth. However, Wendover proved to be pretty useful Captain
Hastings. He may not have grasped the solution, but his knowledge of
local history and family relations helped frame the clutter of
events, more specifically the murders, in a tight frame that will
help readers who like a shot at beating the detective to the finish
line.

Sadly,
Connington inexplicably slipped in the final leg of the story when
Jack-in-the-Box shifted from a tale of ratiocination into a
thrilling shilling shocker with a sadistic murderer drugging and
torturing a man, while trying to force another character to sign a
piece of paper – a shift that happened from one chapter to the
other. And it struck a decidedly false note. Despite this weird,
pulpy revelation of the murderer, the plot was excellent and
particularly the science behind the murders and borderline impossible
events. I especially liked the explanation for the murder of the
local drunk, who died of carbon-monoxide poisoning, which turned out
to have an ingenious explanation that was tied to one of the bombing
raids. Connington should have saved that method for another book
instead of burying it in a series of murders.

Anyway,
these science-based murders demonstrate that Connington was
unquestionable a member of the Humdrum School of Detection.

So,
on a whole, Jack-in-the-Box was an excellent mystery novel
with a fascinating series of crimes, a well-drawn background and
solid detective work, but the revelation of the murderer struck a
false note in the story. It's a smudge on the plot, but not one that
should deter you from enjoying a mostly well-written, cleverly
plotted detective novel.

3/10/18

Recently,
I stumbled across a modern, little-known volume of short stories with
a book-title that captured my imagination, The Case of the
Invisible College and Other Mysteries (2012), which had an
equally alluring sub-title – "Old Style Mysteries Set Amidst
the Dreaming Spires of Oxford." This collection is comprised of
seven (very) short stories, written by Andrew May, who published his
own work under the banner of Post-Fortean
Books.

So,
naturally, I approached this self-published collection of detective
stories with a great deal of trepidation, but an internet search
brought some promising facts to light.

I
found a rare review
of The Case of the Invisible College, which was generally
positive, but, more importantly, the reviewer noted that the lively
stories were written by someone who evidently spent time learning how
to write – rendering the customary criticism of self-published
fiction irrelevant. The reviewer also suspected the stories were
reprinted from “some periodical” and this turned out to be
correct. All seven stories were originally published in the British
Mensa Folio newsletters of 2009 and 2010. Mensa is the high IQ
society. So I believe we can infer from this that May is probably a
smart guy.

Secondly,
I found May's blog, Retro-Forteana,
which is dedicated to "the weirder fringes of history,"
but, to my delight, discovered he had also written
about John
Dickson Carr. I would really like to read his article about "the
Fortean aspects of John Dickson Carr's 'Locked Room Mysteries'" in Fortean Times, 288.

So
that was all I needed to know to take the plunge on these Fortean
detective tales, but what I found was still different from what I was
expecting.

The
cases in this collection are tackled by SOLVED: the Secret Oxford
League of Volunteer Extracurricular Detectives. A crime-fighting
network lead by Pierce Stormson, Professor of Advanced Studies, who
functions as "the central coordinating brain" of the
league and "bore a close resemblance to the fiction character he
admired so much," Sherlock Holmes – which is one of the many
Holmesian charms of this series. For example, Stormson has the habit
to deduce the name or occupations of clients who visit him from the
first time and the stories are littered with references to previous
cases (The Case of the Weeping Buddha, The Case of the Somerville
Stripper, The Case of the Devil's Footprints, etc). And then there's
the Watson-like narrator of the series.

Melvin
Root is doing his Ph.D. on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and acts as
both the chronicler of SOLVED and Stormson's right-hand man, but is
prone to jump to the most outrageous conclusions imaginable. Stormson
and Root draw on the specialized knowledge and talents of the various
SOLVED members who are scattered throughout the university and
beyond. SOLVED is pretty much the Baker Street Irregulars, the
College Years.

"The
Case of the Dangerous Book" is the first story and has Miss Higgs,
a librarian of Old College, consulting Stormson on an 18th century
book. A book bound in human-skin, belonging to a man who studied at
the college in the early 1700, but the book was gifted to the college
under the condition that it should never taken from its shelf as it
was "a dangerous book" - only problem is that it had been
taken of its shelf. The book was kept in the Lower Library, where
book can only be read, which are then left at the table to be
collected by the librarian. And this dangerous book was one of them.
So who consulted this obscure book and why? Only three students were
present at the time, but they appear to be innocent.

Stormson
and Root discover a coded message inside the book and the decoding
the message helps them to uncover a sordid attempt at an equally
sordid crime. The culprit was a dunce, but, on a whole, this was a
fun, little introductory story. Nothing outstanding, but fun.

The
second tale is "The Case of the Invisible College" and, in spite
of the promising title, it's not a grand-scale impossible crime story
about an entire college building vanishing from our plane of
existence. I'm not going to lie, I was mildly disappointed.

Stormson
is called upon by Dr. John Philpott, a post-doctoral research
assistant at the Department of Experimental Physics, who claims to be
on the brink of a breakthrough in cold fusion, but "they"
are out to suppress his work. Dr. Philpott has received a threatening
letter from this nebulous group, telling him not to mess with the
Invisible College, which is why he convinced the head of his
department, Professor Carr, to move his equipment to a secure
laboratory – a laboratory only four people had access to. However,
this did not prevent the destruction of a valuable piece of research
equipment. And, no, this problem isn't an impossible crime either.

The
solution reveals that a respectable university, once again, served as
a respectable front for a sordid criminal operation. So not a bad
story, but again, nothing outstanding.

"The
Case of the Shakespearaan Super-Chimp" is the shortest story in
this collection, but also one of my two favorites. Bonzo, the
experimental chimp of the university, is wired up to a machine and
pictures appear on the screen that shows what the monkey is thinking.
Like a picture of a banana. However, all of a sudden, passages from
Shakespeare's Hamlet began to appear on screen. Root solves
this case with the help of Sanyo Fujitsu, an "electronics
wizard," but without Stormson. A nice story for something so
short.

"The
Case of the Abducted Astrobiologist" is next and begins when
Stormson is visited by Anna Moletsky, the conference manager of
Wolfsbane College, which has a profitable sideline conferences during
the summer vacation when students are away. A conference is about to
be held there on astrobiology and the keynote speaker is Dr. Haakon
Asgrad from Oslo University, who was to give presentation on images
from the Mars Rover, but Asgrad has gone missing – leaving behind
an empty hotel room. Root immediately suggests that aliens come for
him, but Stormson uncovered a more conventional answer rooted in
academic backstabbery. Plot-wise, not a very interesting story, but
ended amusingly when SOLVED dished out their own brand of justice to
the culprit.

The
next story, "The Case of the Ghost in the Machine," is only
interesting to readers who are really fond of lurid pulp-thrillers
from yesteryear, because the story reads like a tongue-in-cheek
treatment of such stories.

A
SOLVED member from a previous case, Sanyo Fujitsu, receives an
unusual email, asking her to come to an address in North Oxford. A
connection is quickly with Professor Maxwell Quain, a once eminent
nuclear physicist, who went mad and began to obsess over alchemy and
the occult – earning him the reputation of a mad scientist. Root is
ready to tackle the case, but loses all interest in the case when he
gets invited to a pagan orgy. Fortunately, for Fujitsu, he mixed up
the addresses and ended up at the home of the mad scientist, who has
sinister intentions and comic villain motive, but it's Stormson who
comes to their rescue and saves the day.

A
very pulpy story that had its moments, such as when Root broke into
the locked house, because he assumed the screaming meant that the
orgy had started without him, but nothing of interest for the amateur
armchair detective.

However,
the next story, "The Case of the Shocking Science Quarterly," is
the standout title of this collection and is only story here with a
truly inspired plot. I was pleasantly reminded of Charles Ardai's "The Last Story," collected in The Return of the Black
Widowers (2003), which both fall in the same pulpy sub-category
of the bibliomystery.

The
plot concerns the extremely rare issue 23 of the Shocking Science
Quarterly, a British pulp magazine, which was printed in the
Summer of 1938, but, as soon as they were reprinted, the Home Office
recalled all copies and had them destroyed – as it reputedly
violated "one of the many obscenity laws of the time."
There are, however, conspiracy theorists who claim to government
wanted to suppress important scientific ideas in the back-up story, "The Amazing Anti-Gravity Machine" by Wilfred Barnes. So all
750,000 copies were recalled, but only 749,999 copies were destroyed.
One copy was retained for legal reasons and stored in a sealed vault
at the Bodleian Library.

This
1938 copy was finally released to the public, under the Freedom of
Information Act, but the only surviving copy disappeared that same
day. Or, rather, the original copy was replaced with a false copy. A
switch that was discovered when Root, who studies gives him a natural
interest early twenty century fiction, found a peculiar print-error
on one of the pages, "Error! Reference source not found."
Sure, it was a science-fiction magazine, but "a modern-day
computer error" is unlikely to appear on the pages of even the
most visionary science-fiction publication of the 1930s. So who made
the switch and how was the person able to fabricate an almost perfect
copy of a pulp magazine that had been sealed for seventy years?

A
handful of people studied the magazine when it was released and all
of them have potential motives.

A
number of people studied the magazine and they all have agendas, and
thus potential, motives to take or destroy it: Sam Rosenberg is a
multimillionaire and well-known collector of 1930s ephemera. Ms.
Arcadia Wolfe is a feminist writer and an anti-pornography crusader.
Professor Harrison Carr is the nuclear physicist who previously
appeared in "The Case of the Invisible College." Finally,
Lancelot Austin, the elderly art-critic and political loudmouth.

All
of them had the opportunity and motive turns out to be key that
unlocks this case. This story is really a why-dun-it, but an
excellent specimen of its kind with a beautiful answer as to why a
false copy had to be supplied. Even more importantly, this is the
only SOLVED story that actually has clues in them! So, yes, this is
unquestionably the best one of the lot.

Finally,
this volumes closes with "The Case of the Inverted Pyramid,"
which sounds interesting, but the story is a complete dud and the
plot reworked Agatha
Christie's "The Case of the Missing Lady," from Partners
in Crime (1929), which is acknowledged by the end of the
story – all that can be said about this story.

On
a whole, these Fortean detective tales were entertaining, well
written stories, but with exception of "The Case of the Shocking
Science Quarterly," the plots tended to be unimpressive. Honestly,
I was surprised that these stories, originally published in a Mensa
newsletter, turned out to be relatively light-weight pastiches of
Sherlock Holmes instead of Ellery
Queen-like Puzzle Club stories. Nevertheless, despite their short
comings, this collection stands head and shoulders above most
self-published books. I think readers of Holmesian fiction will
particular like this short series and anthologists should keep "Shocking Science Quarterly" and "The Shakespearean
Super-Chimp" in mind. Those two stories deserve to be preserved.

3/8/18

The
Clock in the Hatbox (1939) is an early title in the Arthur Crook
series, only the sixth of fifty-some novels, written by "Anthony
Gilbert," a pseudonym of Lucy
Beatrice Malleson, who distinguished herself from her
contemporaries by blending (domestic) suspense with a formal
detective plot – resulting in some unusually-structured mystery
novels (e.g. Something
Nasty in the Woodshed, 1942). As unconventional as Gilbert's
approach to plotting is her morally ambiguous lawyer-detective,
Crook, who was accurately described by Nick
Fuller as having something of "the gusto and cynicism of Sir
Henry Merrivale himself."

The
Clock in the Hatbox appeared on my radar after coming across it
on a list, "Recommendations
by Nick Fuller," originally posted
on the GAD group, which listed this book as the only recommendation
under Gilbert's name. John Norris, of Pretty
Sinister Books, published a laudatory review
of the book last year. Concluding that Gilbert's "unusual
treatment" of the detective story, courtroom drama and
Hitchcockian suspense culminated in a "mindblowing crime novel."
A "landmark mystery novel" that "for some reason is
never mentioned
in the many studies of the detective novel." There were a
number of other reviews
that really enticed me.

My
reason for referring back to their opinion on The Clock in the
Hatbox is that, halfway through the story, I began to suspect my
own opinion was going to be a contrarian one. And then that ending
happened!

The
story opens with the trail of Viola Ross, who stands accused of
having murdered her husband, Teddy Ross, a schoolteacher who was
smothered to death and the clue that landed her in the docks was the
bedside alarm clock – which was found inside a hatbox in the
closet. Whoever put the clock in the hatbox was likely the same
person who placed a pillow over the victim's face. And had forgotten
to replace it.

Viola
was only twenty-three when she married Ross, a man twice her age, but
the marriage provided Viola with security and Teddy with wife.
However, as the years passed, Ross become "the complete domestic
tyrant" and alienated his son from a previous marriage, Harry
Ross, who refused to become a teacher like his father. Ross resented
that Viola sided with his son and even began to harbor suspicions
that they were having an affair. Predictably, he died the night
before he was going to change his will.

So
the police had a motive and all of the evidence argued against Viola,
as well as public opinion, but a death sentence is delayed when the
jury was unable to come to an unanimous decision – deadlocked by a
single juror. The result is a hung jury and a new trial date is set.

The
lone holdout in the jury is an aspiring novelist, Richard Arnold,
absolutely convinced of Viola's innocence and is determined to rescue
her from the gallows.

A
mission supported by Arnold's fiance, Bunty, but her support begins
to slowly wane when a threatening letter arrives demanding that she
tells her boyfriend "he has twenty-four hours left in which the
change his mind." However, this threat only works only worked
as an incentive to carry on the investigation, because Arnold is
clearly making someone nervous. Someone who doesn't want anyone
looking closer at the murder, which is where the Hitchcockian
suspense and thriller-ish elements of the plot come into play.

There
are several attempts to kill Arnold, one of them employing the
gun-with-a-string trick, but a second tragedy happens when the fumes
of a tampered bathroom heater killed a completely innocent man. A man
who died in Arnold's place!

During
his investigation, Arnold engages Arthur Crook, a shrewd lawyer of
"the most enviable repute," but Crook is only peripherally
involved in the case until he pulls the rug from underneath the
reader at the end. Until then, Crook makes a couple of appearances to
warn Arnold not to meddle and give their prey the time to gather "sufficient rope" to hang himself. A warning that was duly
ignored.

A
note for the curious: Crook quotes Gilbert's original
series-detective, Scott Egerton, a rising politician, who appeared in
only ten novels until Crook replaced him in the mid-1930s. Towards
the end, Crook tells Arnold how Egerton always used to say "the
last trump always lies with fate and she bein' female, there's no
telln' how she'll play it."
I always like it when mystery writers acknowledge, one way or
another, that their various series-detectives live in the same
fictional universe.

Somewhere
around the halfway mark of the story, I began to slowly doubt the
judgment of my fellow mystery enthusiasts. After all, the murderer's
identity looked to be rather obvious, especially to seasoned mystery
readers, which would have hardly justified the lavish praise. Don't
get me wrong, it would still have been a well-written, cleverly put
together detective novel with a good play on the least-likely-suspect
gambit, but I began to think that the book had been overpraised –
which is when I arrived at the twist in the story's tail. A
triumphant ending that can be likened to Anthony Berkeley's Jumping
Jenny (1933).

I
also understand now why Norris liked the book so much, because The
Clock in the Hatbox reminded me of Joan Fleming's Polly
Put the Kettle On (1952), which Norris glowingly reviewed.
The books are as similar as they differ, mainly in the approach they
take to the plot, but, in the end, the similarities really are
striking. If you like the one, you'll probably like the other.

All
in all, The Clock in the Hatbox is a classic textbook example
of what it is that attracts me to these cunningly cut gems from the
genre's Golden Era. I went in with expectations that were, perhaps
too high, but began to get slightly disappointed as the explanation
appeared to be obvious in spite of the author's to cover it up as
inconspicuously as possible – only to learn at the end that I was
supposed to think that all along! The Clock in the Hatbox is
without question one of Gilbert's best detective novels and deserves
to better known.

And
speaking of detective stories that (probably) deserve to be better
known, I recently got my hands on a genuinely unknown collection of
short detective stories. They look very promising and, if they're any
good, I might have actually unearthed something interesting. I think
there are even some impossible crime stories in this collection! So
that surprise collection will be next.

3/6/18

Q.E.D.
is a Japanese detective manga created by Motohiro Katou, who produced
50 volumes between 1997 and 2014, originally serialized in Magazine
GREAT, but chapters were later published in respectively Magazine
E-no and Magazine Plus – an impressive run that moved
over 3 million copies and spawned a live-action TV-series. And, as to
be expected from a shōnen
mystery, the protagonists are high-school students who, somehow,
attract murderers like an overpowered super magnet.

Sou
Touma is a 14-year-old genius, who's already an MIT graduate, but
moved back to Japan to experience live as a normal high-school
student. Only problem is that he has the social skills of a hermit
and loves to hang out by himself on the roof of the school. This is,
by the way, a staple of manga-and anime series that take place around
a school. They always hang around on the school roof.

Luckily,
Touma befriends a classmate, Kana Mizuhara, who knows her way around
the social norm of polite society and loves sports, which makes her
perfect to play the Archie Goodwin to his Nero Wolfe. It helps
tremendously that Kana's father is a homicide detective who's smart
enough to recognize Touma's talent as an amateur detective and allows
him to meddle in his work.

The
first of the two stories that make up the inaugural volume, titled "The Owl of Minerva," takes place at the central building of "the
famous A-KS game company" where Kana is spending a rainy
evening at the gaming center with a friend, Norika Arita – who's
the daughter of the company's president. On their way out, they
witness an altercation between two gamers. One of them is Touma, who
not only utterly demolished his opponent, but honestly told him his
movements were predictable and that he sucked. So Kana intervened and
took him out of the situation, which marked the first occasion that
she really interacted with her famous, but reclusive, classmate.

Not
long after this incident, Norika is whisked away to a locked-off, top
floor level of the building and the place is suddenly swarming with
police. Kane even sees her father, Inspector Mizuhara, enter the
building. She overhears him saying that there's "a case on the
23rd floor" of the building.

So
Kana grabs Touma by the collar and drags him to an employee-only
elevator, protected with an electronic, three-digit code lock, which
Touma cracks by using the good old pencil trick to make fingerprints
appear on the type-pad – after which they spend some time peeking
around corners and gathering information. What they learn is that the
company president, Norika's father, was stabbed to death in his
office and the CCTV footage shows that only six people were present
on the 23rd floor at the time of the murder. And the police found a
dying message.

A young Wolfean at work

A
crumpled playing card, the King of Diamonds, was pried from the hand
of President Arita and a second playing card, the Queen of Hearts,
was found on his desk. What really surprised me is that this dying
message was symbolic and, therefore, solvable even for readers who
don't speak Japanese. As a rule, dying messages and coded messages in
Japanese detective manga and anime series hinge on the Japanese
language, which makes them practically unsolvable to Western readers.
Everything one of these dying message or code cracking stories turns
up in a series, like Detective Conan, I turn-off my brain and
just enjoy the story and that's what I did here.

After
all, even the translator appeared to be baffled by this particular
dying clue, because one of the characters pointed out a potential
connection between the crumpled playing card and a suspect with the
name Juuzo, but this was never explained and this was followed by a
footnote – explaining that translator also had no idea what the
connection could have been. However, it was in the original Japanese
text and therefore it was left in the translation. So it was
interesting that the dying message turned out to have a practical
explanation and therefore solvable.

A
second aspect of this story I found interesting is that Touma and
Kana couldn't simply walk around the crime-scene and ask everyone
impertinent questions. Touma placed a wire on Kana, who pretended to
be a young journalist, while he listened to her investigation from
behind a computer in his book-lined room. A room that looked
suspiciously to the room from another a detective manga that was seen
in the first volume of that series.

Anyway,
Kana eventually introduces Touma to her father and he's really
impressed by the boy's deductive abilities. When Touma acts for his
cooperation, he violently shakes the boy and yelled in his face, "tell me everything"
and "what should I do." Why do I never meet homicide
detectives like that?

The
solution itself is not too bad for a introductory story. I caught on
the murderer very early on in the story, because this person used a
very old locked room technique to throw off suspicion within this
closed circle of suspects. I was immediately suspicious of this
person's actions and I turned out to be correct. So, on a whole, not
a bad kickoff to this series.

In
the second and last story of this volume, "The Silver Eye," Kana
drags Touma to a doll exhibition to meet a friend of hers,
Suzu-nee-chan, who's the daughter of a very famous doll maker,
Katsumi Nanasawa – who's considered a cultural asset of the nation.
During the exhibition, Touma confronts a fanatical doll collector,
Kakuzo Akutso, who made an underhanded, but daring, attempt to steal
one of the dolls on display. Nanasawa has resolutely refused to sell
the odious collector any of her dolls and, ever since, he has
attempted to get his hands on them without having to pay for them.

Nanasawa
is an elderly, sick and wheelchair-bound woman and is pretty much at
the end of her life. So she devised a plan to keep her beloved dolls
out of Akutso's hands. She plans to donate her house and all the
dolls in it to the government and turn it into a doll museum, but,
shortly after she passes away, the family estate makes an unsettling
discovery. A list of sponsors for the museum turns out to be shill
companies that are owned by Akutso and this gives him an opening to
obtain the entire collection if the museum ever goes bankrupt.
However, death intervenes in this plan.

Akutso
suffered from arrhythmia and had a pacemaker to make his heart beat
at a regular pace, but this did not prevent his heart from stopping
and his body was found in one of the doll rooms. One of Nanasawa's
lifelike dolls was standing over the body. A smaller, but valuable,
doll was missing from the room and the investigation is hampered by
the statement of the three suspects/witnesses. They all give
different statements about who find the body and what happened
thereafter.

I
guess most readers will probably catch on how Akutso died, especially
after Kana checks up on a clue for Touma by climbing over the roof
into the murder room, but the final twist was also pretty obvious.
However, it makes for an, overall, nice and pleasant detective story
with an interesting background.

My only real complaint is that the
murder method was not used to create a fun little locked room
mystery, like the one from Clyde
B. Clason's The Man from Tibet (1938), but the story
required the suspects to have immediate access to the room. So you
can hardly hold that against the writer.

On
a whole, Q.E.D. is an interesting detective series with fun
characters and relatively good plots. Granted, the plots aren't as
good, or strong, as those found in Case Closed or
Detective Academy Q, but they show potential to grow and
improve. After all, my favorite detective manga, Case Closed,
started with some really weak stories and look how that turned out.
So you can expect my return to Q.E.D. in the near future.

3/4/18

Back
in 2016, I reviewed The
Floating Body (2015) by Kel
Richards, an Australian journalist and broadcaster, who has been
writing crime-fiction since the early nineties and his latest
undertaking is a series of historical impossible crime novels –
casting C.S. Lewis in the role of both detective and lay theologian.
I commented at the time that the book was a bit of a genre-mutt. A
mutt who was not entirely devoid of charm, but a mutt nonetheless.

Richards
attempted to write a book that was a historical novel, a detective
story, a reminiscence of public school fiction, a Wodehousean homage
and a sermon.

Regrettably,
the result was less than perfect and an anonymous commentator
observed that everything about the book struck him as recycled, "even
the cover is a phony," which is hard to argue against as
Richards was obviously riffing on his pet writers and hobby-horse
subjects (e.g. theology and morality).

However, I promised at the end
of my review to return to this series for a second serving and, at
the time, a fourth book had been announced with a curiously gruesome
murder inside a locked room, but, to be upfront about it, it turned
out to be more of the same – even if the impossible murder had a
novel explanation. But more on that later.

The
Sinister Student (2016) is the fourth book in this series and
takes place in 1936, among the dreaming spires of Oxford, where the
narrator of the series, Tom Morris, returns after a year of absence.
Morris is hoping to secure a position as the leader writer at the
Oxford Mail, but shortly after his arrival he meets his old
mentor, C.S. Lewis, who invites him to a meeting of the Inklings.
A real-life literary discussion club that included J.R.R. Tolkien,
Hugo Dyson, Rev. Adam Fox and Neville Coghill.

All
of them make an appearance in this book and Tolkien even becomes a
supporting character. During their meeting, he even reads the latest
chapter from a book he has been writing, The Hobbit (1937),
which delights all but one person who attended the meeting.

The
Honorable Aubrey Willesden is a high-handed, unlikable student who,
somehow, received an invitation to the meeting, but, to Morris'
shock, Willesden is of the opinion that the circle is "vastly
overrated" and dismisses Tolkien's story as a mere fairy tale,
which has no place in a prestigious university – only in a nursery.
Morris can't believe that anyone, who listened to "the vivid
storytelling in the classic tradition of the great epics,"
could have left the meeting unaffected, but he awakes the following
morning to something even more unbelievable.

A
house scout was asked by Willesden to wake him up that morning, to
catch a train to London, but he can't rouse him and the solid door to
his room was locked from the inside. The door is broken down by two
gardeners and they make a gruesome discovery inside the room.

Willesden
had been "savagely beheaded" and the wound, where his neck
had been, had oozed "a great pool of blood across the floor,"
but the head and murder weapon were miraculously missing from the
room! The only door had not only been locked from the inside, but
bolted as well and the windows had been securely latched. So there
was no way, whatsoever, a murderer could have entered, or left, the
room carrying a severed head and a bloodied weapon. However,
everything at the scene of the crime suggests that's exactly what
happened.

Written at the time of this case

A
local policeman, Inspector Fleming, failed to find the head and
immediately handed over the case to Scotland Yard, which brings
Detective Inspector Gideon Crispin and Sergeant Henry Merrivale to
the university. Yes, these two characters aren't exactly, what you
call, a subtle nod at John
Dickson Carr and Edmund
Crispin. And they don't do all that much in the story exact
dragging a nearby river for the head and murder weapon.

There's
also a sub-plot running through the story, known as "The Mystery of
the Missing Milton," concerning a first edition of John Milton's
Paradise Lost (1667), which has gone missing from the Bodleian
Library and the last person who had handled it was Lewis – who is
(unofficially) suspected of being the book thief. This angers his
brother, "Warnie," who's determined to clear his brother's name,
but, in my opinion, this plot-thread is merely filler to pad out the
story. So this is as good a point as to make up the balance between
the good and bad points of the book. I'll start with the bad aspects
of the story.

First
of all, there's the ongoing theological discussion between Lewis (a
Christian) and Morris (an atheist), which are hammered, like
doorstops, into various points of the narrative and this can be
rather awkward as well as annoying. For example, early on in the
story Lewis and Morris are looking out of the window, observing the
line of policemen combing the school lawn for the missing head, when
the former says "ah, yes" we "were talking about the
way in which people die" and "the reason why people die."
And they simply resume their discussion about the sacrifice of Jesus
Christ and the cross. This stop-and-go discussion littered the pages
from beginning to end.

In
my opinion, the book, or rather the whole series, would have been
better served had Richards contained these theological discussions to
a single (long-ish) chapter, somewhere, in the middle of a book –
like a locked room sermon. Unfortunately, I don't believe Richards is
really interested in writing strong Christian-themed mystery novels.
Obviously, he likes the classic detective stories and the locked room
mystery, but my impression is that he sees them as a pulpit to preach
from and this comes at the expense of the plot. And that's, in my
book, an unpardonable sin.

A
second sin is that the story, as a whole, is pretty dull and nothing
of interest really happens until the end, which is quite an
accomplish for a detective story about a brutal decapitation inside a
locked and bolted room. The murderer, along with the motive, is even
presented to the reader on a silver platter and then gets ignored by
everyone until the final chapters. This is not what a good detective
story should be like!

Lastly,
I really began to dislike Morris over the course of this book, who
comes across here as a weak-kneed pushover, which is exemplified in
how he's used by a potential love-interest, the haughty Penelope
Robertson-Smyth, who treats him with a complete lack of respect –
like he's nothing more than a piece of modeling clay who might be
molded in something remotely desirable. It's not until the end, when
she tells him she never wants to see him again, that he finally pulls
himself up by his own spine and whimpers, "I'm over her now."
Morris also never provides any real opposition to Lewis, who lectures
him like a child.

Luckily,
the book was not entirely bad and had some positive aspects. One of
these aspects is that story, like its predecessor, had a good amount
of charm and was very readable, but also appreciated the cryptic clue
Lewis gave to Morris. Lewis told him that, over the years, some of
his students have been adroit and some have been sinister.
Statistically, "most have been adroit" and "only a
minority sinister." Morris was an adroit student and Willesden
was a sinister student. Although, I think Richards should have used
the word dexterous, instead of adroit, this clue was neatly tied to
the solution of the locked room murder.

A
pretty good locked room trick, all things considered, that deserved a
better treatment. One that would have used the arterial gushing of
the neck wound as a clue. The spurt of blood, after the head came
off, would have literally pointed in the direction of the (locked
room) solution, but here I go nitpicking again. So let me tell you
about the one thing I, as a purist, should have hated, but ended up
loving it.

There's
a foreign student at the university, David Bracken, who has an
old-fashioned wardrobe in his room, but this wardrobe has a special
quality that transported the book to the border-region where genres
meet. Admittedly, this element is completely out-of-place in
historical mystery novels, but this part was surprisingly
well-handled and loved the reason why Bracken was present there. Not
everyone is going to like it, but I was pleasantly surprised by it.

On a whole, The Sinister Student wasn't an unpleasant read,
but neither was it a very exciting one and the overall plot was, in
spite of a relatively good locked room trick, mediocre at best. And
this can be solely blamed on the author who preferred proselytizing
over plotting. The storytelling and characters have their charm,
sure, but this is not enough for readers to whom plot is the most
important feature of a detective novel.

I'm
not entirely sure whether I'll be taking a crack at the other titles
in this series, The Country House Murders (2015) and The
Corpse in the Cellar (2015), which are impossible crime novels,
but everything suggests they suffer from the same weaknesses as The
Floating Body and The Sinister Student. So, if I take
another look at this locked room series, it won't be for another year
or two.

So
far this overlong, drag of a review and I'll try to grab something
good from the pile for the next time.

The Usual Suspect

An Elementary Observation

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants.

Witnesses' Statements

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre)."The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).